Towards a New Map of Our Adopted Home

September 8, 2016

As stated last year, Enduring Puberty Press wants to promote a practice of radical (small r, because I want to avoid any specific political connotations, while still owning up to whatever our politics plays in the content) geography (small g, because I’m just beginner student, and haven’t yet learned any technical aspects of the field). Radical Geography, what the fuck does that mean, you may ask? [At this point you may click on the video below, if you don’t want to read the following intro]

In the simplest of terms, we want to bear witness to the things that are out there barely noticed. Things both hidden and things in just too plain of site. We want to show spaces that have no official specific public function in the eyes of a general public, places that have an interesting appearance, natural or human-made, that could easily (and sometimes are) be private spaces, but can plausibly be utilized for intimate public gatherings or events. The video below is a wonderful example of this. It is set in my adopted home town of Lawrence, Kansas. Yes Lawrence has a tiny desert. Yes, we probably trespassed on a sunny but somewhat mild Labor Day morning. Yes, like childhood majestic alleyways, those unacknowledged commons, there was nobody around but us nature loving urban explorers and an abandoned piece of steel from an already forgotten (forgettable?) age.

I believe that everyone of us has a personal past that cannot be fully uncovered. Spaces like the Lawrence desert speak to that. Likewise there’s history that cannot be fully covered. By acknowledging the presence of human-made objects AND THEN reinterpreting them yourself –helpful to remember that everyone interprets the world on a daily basis, even as most aren’t aware of doing such– you can tell your own story. Whatever your role now, the fact of your oppression, or at the least to the extent of your being a victim or helpless bystander of political economic forces beyond your control, can be taken into account, even if just in a fictional context. I think this is why cargo cults, as a thing, are worth reading about. Please absorb with your sensorium-informed consciousness this slide put together by the staff of/at Enduring Puberty Press.

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I do this with music. I’ve lived all over the country, so returning regularly to all those places just isn’t feasible. But music that I haven’t heard in decades takes me back to when I heard it and the brain maps in the associated places and circumstances. I can then ‘look’ at those places and times in the mind’s eye from a long way off in space and time. More than ‘reminescence’ it is with today’s updated brain. Herb Alpert’s “Flamingo” got played a lot in my childhood so it seems to reveal a lot like that. Like therapy going over old grooves in the brain elicits more and more. It takes practice, but I feel I learn about myself.